Lemmy started off as much more left-wing, to the extent that it had a hard-coded slur filter that only recently was made something configurable. The choice of .ml has been proposed as being chosen because it represents "Marxist Leninist" (and I don't know if that's true or not), but many of the original instances were highly censored.

That being said, I've been both left and right and presently I'm more right wing, and a lot of the time I write up some big screed in response to something dumb or evil and then just hit "close tab" because when I'm on someone else's instance I want to be a good houseguest and not cause trouble.

Such people have been surrounded by an echo chamber for years and years, they never hear any viewpoints other than what the establishment feeds them, and I don't really want to waste my time fighting against the propaganda power of multiple nation-state coalitions.

(I did make the mistake of accidentally saying what I thought a while back, and now I've got a bunch of smug idiots on my case)

I figure it's only a matter of time until the rest of the fediverse starts to arrive (I've heard through the grapevine some other instances considering starting up their own lemmy instances), and then things will be a lot more balanced.